I grew up in a church tradition that told us each Sunday how hopelessly depraved and sinful we were, with no possibility for being anything other than sinful unless we went through a specific kind of salvation experience taught by that tradition.  By the time I...

A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses . . . from “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov We wake these days to the distressing news of a new...

I once heard a minister deliver a sermon entitled “Humble Pie a la Mode.”  A clever title—and a perfect instance of how we tend to view humility, especially in the context of liberal religion: humility is not a virtue, but rather a problem, a symptom of lacking a...

  Fairness may be a nearly universal value, something all seek to demonstrate in our dealings with one another, certainly something all expect to receive when we are being dealt with, whether by laws or government agencies or neighbors or family members.  We love...

  After a very long time of weekly therapy appointments with no evident change or lifting of the depression that gripped me, I one day marched into the therapist’s office to declare that I was done with trying to improve, to get better, to make changes in...

  A member of my congregation once argued that the key element in aging well was learning to be dependent.  I felt terrified by such an idea—because it rang true for me.  We spend the first half of our lives developing an increasing level of independence, from...

I recently came way too close to a tornado, close enough to be in the swirl of debris a tornado accumulates along its path, close enough to narrowly miss having a tree dropped on my car.  As is often the case when one skates near disaster, the tornado encounter has...

As a minister, I believe that keeping promises is crucial and hold it as one of my highest values.  Within a congregation, covenants—which are a series of promises the people in a congregation make to one another—serve to bind individuals together in a community. ...

Two friends and I have been reading and discussing The Inner Work of Aging by Connie Zweig. We recently completed a chapter that invited the exercise of a life review, in which one considers all that one has done, a kind of summing up of the journey and reflection on...

I thought by now my life would be different, or rather that I would be different.  I took to heart that typical response of adults to children’s questions once complicated matters have moved into focus, how “you’ll understand when you get older.” I counted on reaching...